UMS'nJIP
are a Swiss contemporary music duo
based in Münster
(Valais/Switzerland)
at the foot of the Finsteraarhorn and the Rhone
Glacier, consisting of Ulrike Mayer-Spohn (UMS) on recorders
& electronics and Javier Hagen (JIP), voice &
electronics.
One of the most experienced and distinguished contemporary
music laboratories of our times, they work as composers,
performers and organizers within a
global network
of composers, visual artists, stage directors,
researchers, universities and festivals. Their special interest in long term
collaboration, with its exchange of knowledge and
awareness, brings context to new creations and results
in an outstanding increase of artistic content. In this
manner, UMS'nJIP explore new settings for voice,
recorders and electronics, ranging from live to digital
performance in concert, scenic or installative formats
and often integrate European as well as non-European
music.
UMS'nJIP have been invited to perform at prestigious contemporary
music festivals around the world including Zürich,
Lucerne, Donaueschingen, Stuttgart, Berlin, Paris, Venice,
Barcelona, Athens, Istanbul, Cairo, Moscow, Shanghai, Hong
Kong, Seoul, Tongyeong, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City,
and New York. They have premiered hundreds of works,
collaborating with both world famous and aspiring young
composers such as Heiner Goebbels, Wolfgang Rihm, Mauricio
Kagel, Jennifer Walshe, Wolfgang Mitterer, Erik Oña, Luis
Codera Puzo, Chikashi Miyama, Du Yun, Huang Ruo and Guo
Wenjing. They can look back on more than
1300 concerts since their
debut in 2007 and are one of the most active contemporary
music ensembles worldwide, bringing both young and
established works not only to famous venues but also to
audiences who do not have easy access to live performances
of top quality contemporary music.
Both individually and as a duo UMS and JIP have received
numerous commissions
and awards and have been invited to
share their knowledge in renowned universities in
Europe, America and Asia. JIP is also the director of the
Swiss Contemporary Music Festival Forum Wallis and the
current president of
ISCM Switzerland, he serves as well the boards of the
European Conference of Promoters of New Music ECPNM
(2014-8), the Swiss Music Edition, and of the UNESCO
Commission for the Inventory of Intangible Cultural
Heritage in the Canton of Valais (2009-18). Since 2013
UMS has been pioneering two research projects: Recorder Map
and Recorderology,
and the duo has been invited to act as experts in the
European Union's FP7 i-Treasures project.
A high performance
small scale contemporary music laboratory and
global network
Although UMS’nJIP do handle an impressive workload, their
aim is not to premiere as much as possible but to perform
new works as often as possible – since works basically
grow by being performed.
At a time in which it is increasingly difficult to defend
reflective, not primarily commercially-oriented music,
UMS’nJIP maximize artistic adventurousness by reducing
economic risk to a minimum: Strict adherence to a small
cast, supported by exceptional and internationally
recognized experience, expertise, versatility, agility and
unique ness means that UMS’nJIP can call themselves one of
the most active contemporary music ensembles worldwide,
alongside Ensemble Modern, Intercontemporain and Kronos
Quartet. The large number of performances implies a
remarkably high performance rate of new works (up to 100
performances per work, well above the global average for
classical contemporary music < 5), and, more important,
this deeply benefits the performance quality and emotional
impact of the performed works.
Thanks to the consistently small scale of their projects,
UMS’nJIP can achieve their projects with both great
flexibility and irregular financing, especially in
countries where new music is in a politically and
financially difficult position and the featuring of high
quality new music is particularly important in concerts
and teaching. Fully aware that creativity cannot only be
brought to society by performances but also by active
participation in cultural politics, UMS’nJIP are also
involved in different local, national and international
structures. Within these structures, they have initiated
more than 500 further projects and commissions since 2006.
UMS
Extraordinary
diversity describes the composer and multi-instrumentalist Ulrike
Mayer-Spohn who plays the recorder (with a focus
on contemporary music), as well as historical string
instruments (fiddle and baroque violin). She studied composition and audio design with Erik
Oña at the Studio of Electronic Music, Academy of Music,
Basel, beginning to compose in 2007, and receiving
commissions from the festival Forum Valais and the
international New Music Days, Shanghai. Her work has been
performed by the Stuttgart Vocal soloists, Ensemble Phoenix
Basel, Vertigo, DissonArt, L'Arsenale, cool a cappella (1st
Prize world choir games 2008) and her own ensemble Ums' n
Jip in Switzerland, France, Greece, Italy, Russia,
Australia, the USA and China, premiered under the baton of
Beat Furrer, Mark Foster, Tsung Yeh, Jürg Henneberger and
Filippo Perocco and broadcast by the Swiss radio. She was awarded the 1st Prize in the Walter
Ferrato composition contest in Savona 2017, the 1st Prize in
the Weimarer Frühjahrstage für Zeitgenössische Musik
composition contest 2017, the 1st Prize in the London Ear
Festival composition contest 2016, the 2nd Prize in the
composition competition Culturescapes 2010, 2nd Prize in the
composition competition at the Bern music festival 2011, the
Scholarship Award for 2011 at the Music Village Mount Pelion
in Greece and the Call for Scores Award L'Arsenale Treviso,
Italy 2011. In the ensemble Ums' n
Jip she has undertaken research in the field of musical
theater (chamber operas One, Two, Three, Four, Five), live
electronic music and sound spacialization. She studied
recorder with Ulrike Mauerhofer at the Musikhochschule
Karlsruhe, with Conrad Steinmann and Corina Marti at the
Schola Cantorum Basel before specializing in contemporary
music and studying with Dorothea Winter at the Royal
Conservatory in The Hague. From
2009-11 she studied for a specialized master's degree in
contemporary performance at the HSM in Basel supervised by
Jürg Henneberger, Marcus Weiss and Mike Svoboda and has
taken masterclasses with Marion Verbruggen, Peter van
Heyghen, Sebastien Marq and Gerd Lünenbürger. She studied
baroque violin and viola with Martina Graulich and David
Plantier and fiddle with Randal Cook in Basel. Ulrike
Mayer-Spohn works with internationally leading composers and
annually plays more than 20 world premieres dedicated to
her, which she has recorded for the radio as well as VDE
Gallo and col legno on CD. Together
with the Swiss composer and singer Javier Hagen, she
established the experimental new music duo Ums `N Jip for
voice, recorder and electronics, which, alongside the
Ensemble Modern, Intercontemporain and Kronos is one of the
most active ensembles worldwide and in 2011 won the
prestigious MusiquePro scholarship. Since
1999, Ulrike Mayer-Spohn has also performed as a recorder
player, violinist, violist and fiddle player in specialized
early music ensembles such as the Amsterdam Barok Compagnie,
Freitagsakademie, Collegium Musicum Stuttgart, La Chapelle
Ancienne, Musica Poetica, Muscadin and La Morra and has
performed in Germany, China, the Netherlands, France, Spain,
Italy and Switzerland. ulrikems.info
JIP
Javier Hagen is one of the most astonishing classical singers of his generation: new music, performance art and Swiss folk music rank equally in his repertoire alongside opera and early music. Hagen was born as Javier-Ignacio Palau-Ribes (JIP) in 1971 in Barcelona and raised between 6 languages on the Mediterranean and in the Valais Alps. He studied classical singing (both tenor and countertenor) in Germany, Italy and Switzerland with Roland Hermann, Alain Billard and Nicolai Gedda, and composition with Heiner Goebbels and Wolfgang Rihm. He studied Lied with Irwin Gage, Hartmut Höll and Ernst Haefliger and early music with Karel van Steenhoven and Kees Boeke. He has a four-octave vocal range. Hagen has worked with world-class composers such as Reimann, Kagel, Rosenmann and Eötvös and leading artists from the worlds of concrete poetry and constructive art such as Eugen Gomringer, Uecker and Rolf Schroeter. Guest appearances have taken him to the modern music festivals in Donaueschingen, Zurich, Geneva, Lucerne, Karlsruhe, Amsterdam, Strasbourg, Bologna, Milan, Prague, New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Adelaide, Riga, Avignon and Berlin. Alongside operatic roles such as Handel's Giulio Cesare, Zsupan (Kalman), Dardanus (Rameau), Stanislaus (Zeller), Bruno (Roesler), Toni (Kalman) and Pappacoda (Strauss), Javier Hagen has premiered more than 300 works, including operas 'à l'air en verre' by Daniel Mouthon 'eismeer' by Christoph Schiller, 'poem ohne held' by Regina Irman, 'esther de racine' by Boris Yoffe, 'The Madman's Diary' by Guo Wenjing, 'Marienglas' by Beat Gysin, 'Les Musiciens de Brème' by Wen Deqing, 'Keyner nit' by Mathias Steinauer, 'Ushba et Tetnuld' by Nicolas Vérin and almost all vocal works by Maria Porten. He has made more than 50 recordings and broadcasts for Swiss, German, French, Czech, Chinese, Russian, Mongolian, Spanish, Egyptian, Italian and Latvian radio and television. He won prizes at international contemporary music and composition competitions in 2001, 2004 and 2008 in Basel, Lausanne and Dusseldorf. In 2003, his distorted folk song arrangements "s´sch mr alles 1 Ding" were released on CD on the Swiss label "musiques suisses". His compositions, in particular the vocal works, are performed throughout Europe, Israel, China, Korea, Russia, Australia, North and Central America, by ensembles and conductors including Titus Engel, Ensemble Phoenix, Basler Madrigalisten, Schweizer Jugendchor, Männerstimmen Basel, Philip Bride, Eliana Burki, Amar Quartet. In 2012, a selection of his graphic scores was shown at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art ‘haus konstruktiv’ in Zurich. At the European Youth Choir Festival 2012, Javier Hagen represented German-speaking Switzerland in the context of 'Swiss Composers meet Europe'. With Ulrike Mayer-Spohn, Hagen formed the experimental new music duo UMS 'n JIP, which, with over 100 concerts annually is one of the most active and prolific contemporary music ensembles around the world and winner of the prestigious scholarship MusiquePro. Javier Hagen also directs the international contemporary music festival Forum Wallis, hosting Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet with André Richard and the Arditti String Quartet in 2015. He is called as an expert on experimental music theater for the University of Arts in Bern, he is the President of the Swiss Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM Switzerland), of IGNM-VS and serves the boards of the European Conference of Promoters of New Music ECPNM (2015-2018), of the Swiss Music Edition (2016-), Score Follower (2020-) and Swissfestivals (2013-2019). He presents guest lectures at universities in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo, Moscow, Istanbul, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Adelaide, New York, Thessaloniki, Barcelona, Riga and is member of the academic board of the Contemporary Opera Academy at the Festival de Nueva Opera de Buenos Aires (FNOBA) related to the Teatro Colon. He is a jury member at national and international composition and new music competitions (a.o. ISCM World Music Days Young Composers Award, Bohol Philippines Int. Choir Competition) and a member of various committees on behalf of the canton of Valais as well as for the inventory of the cultural heritage on behalf of UNESCO (2009-2018). In 2007 he was nominated for "Walliser of the Year." In 2013 he was awarded the Prix Culturel de l'Etat du Valais. In 2021 he was appointed by the Inamori Foundation to nominate candidates for the renowned Kyoto Music Prize. javierhagen.ch